Raising poultry, particularly broiler chickens, is a major industry in the United States of America today. A typical chicken house can be 360 feet long and 40 feet wide. Such chicken houses, especially in the Southern states where below freezing temperatures are rare, typically take the form of shelters having a roof and open sides. The floor of the poultry raising area is simply compacted and levelled earth which extends the length and width of the chicken house.
It is customary to provide such chicken houses or shelters with roll-down curtains to cover the open sides especially when there is rain accompanied by wind, to both protect the chickens and to prevent extensive wetting of the floor of the raising area.
Despite these precautions, the floor of the raising area frequently becomes wet either from rain or from drinking water spilled by the poultry. Also, poultry droppings if permitted to fall directly to the earth would adhere, making it difficult to clean the droppings from the floor without also removing some of the floor surface, which has the disadvantage, after repeated cleanings of lowering the surface below the surrounding grade so that rain water would tend to flood and accumulate. Further, an earth floor per se is unhealthy for the poultry.
As a result, it has been the custom in the past to provide a layer of litter on the floor of the poultry raising area of a depth of perhaps several inches. Of the various litters used in the past, sawdust has been found to be the most satisfactory because of its ability to absorb moisture from the chicken droppings thereby causing them to dry reasonably quickly, and also has the ability to surface dry quite quickly if the sawdust becomes wet from rain or spilled drinking water. Another reason for using sawdust is that the sawdust provides a relatively soft cover on the earth floor and can be scraped from the floor to clean the chicken house.
With present farming methods chicks grow to broiler size in approximately seven weeks. After each batch of chickens is removed, the floor of the chicken raising area must be prepared for a new batch of chicks.
After seven weeks, a great deal of droppings accumulate on the floor in large cakes, and these cakes must be eliminated. In the past, when sawdust was inexpensive and available, the sawdust and caked droppings would be scraped off for example, with a bulldozer type scraper blade and the scraped material would simply be pushed to one end of the chicken raising area and hauled away, and a new layer of fresh sawdust was then spread on the floor. However, sawdust is now quite expensive and frequently unavailable, because of its extensive use in the manufacture of composition board for use as a substitute for natural lumber, which has become very expensive. Correspondingly, this previous technique of simply scraping the spent litter from the floor together with the droppings is no longer ecomonical, and is frequently not possible because of the unavailability of replacement sawdust.